


The Clock Has No Pity

by AsheRhyder



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Ambiguous Continuity, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/M, M/M, Other, Whole Lot of Ambiguity Going On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 14:19:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3532505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsheRhyder/pseuds/AsheRhyder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a man on the edge of time who's witnessed the destruction of empires.  He's walked through many ages and been known by many names: He Who Casts No Shadow, Thousand Eyes, Aeon Strider, and The Watcher. </p><p>Solas will know him by a different name, and for the sake of the Inquisitor, he will know Solas by all of his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Clock Has No Pity

**Author's Note:**

> “Yet each man kills the thing he loves,   
> By each let this be heard,  
>  Some do it with a bitter look,   
> Some with a flattering word,   
> The coward does it with a kiss,   
> The brave man with a sword!   
> Some kill their love when they are young,  
>  And some when they are old;  
>  Some strangle with the hands of Lust,   
> Some with the hands of Gold:   
> The kindest use a knife, because   
> The dead so soon grow cold.   
> Some love too little,  
> some too long,   
> Some sell, and others buy;   
> Some do the deed with many tears,   
> And some without a sigh:   
> For each man kills the thing he loves,  
>  Yet each man does not die.”
> 
> ― Oscar Wilde

  
_**Before:** _  
      
   _Despair. Desolation. Denial. Defiance. Destruction. Don’t._  
_Once. One. Or. Other. Only. Of._  
_Reckless. Relentless. Risk. Rejection._  
_Intervals. Interwoven. Instantly._  
_And. All._  
_(for)_  
_Nothing._  
  
_No, don’t—!_  


* * *

_**Then/A:** _

  
    There was no shortage of ruins across Thedas, and every week it seemed someone unearthed another one and politely requested the Inquisitor take a look at it. Most of them were elven, but there were a few dwarven ruins, and even the occasional lost human city to explore. One time there was even the remnants of a Qunari camp, though it was hardly what anyone could call ‘ancient’, and they found little to explain what happened.  
  
    On this particular expedition the ruins were elven, uncovered after a nasty fight involving a high dragon and a dammed lake that didn’t stay dammed after the dragon fell in it. The water drained into a nearby chasm and revealed buildings that were submerged in a previous age. There was little hope of finding lore, but the ancients had always found ways of preserving important things, so the Inquisitor took Cole, Blackwall, and Solas into the remains of the city in search of anything salvageable.  
  
    Halfway through rummaging in a little pot for leftover coins, Cole suddenly stood up, turned around, and headed for the hall.  
  
    “Cole?” the Inquisitor asked cautiously. Experience dictated that when the rogue left the room, it was usually time to follow suit.  
      
    “It’s old, so very old, and a very deep pain,” said the spirit boy, walking almost blindly with his hands outstretched. “It’s very faint, an echo of a sob, a gasp, a shattering...” He stopped in front of a door, fingers frozen above a dully glowing glyph. “‘Wait here, it’s not safe. I’ll come get you when they’re gone.’ ‘No, don’t leave me here, it whispers to me, asks questions.’ ‘Don’t be silly, there’s no time, I’ll be back.’ Door shuts, locks, never opens. No one here, but not alone.”  
  
    Solas frowned at the glyph and the carvings on the door around it.  
  
    “It’s a very old sort of warding,” he said. “Designed to prevent entry by those who seek to cause harm to those within.”  
      
    “Sounds useful,” said the Inquisitor.  
  
    “Less so than you would think, overall.” He reached out and pushed on the door with his staff. The glyph’s glow brightened, then died. “If you don’t know what’s inside, it doesn’t recognize any intent. Generally this kind of thing appeared during conflicts, when malicious intent was overt.”  
      
    “Sounds about right for what the boy was going on about.” Blackwall grunted. He took point and stepped into the room, shield up and eyes sweeping for any residual dangers.  
  
    By the look of the place, it was someone’s workshop, filled with the tools of creation and sealed against the elements so that the water never touched the inside. There were half finished mirror frames against one wall, plates of glass on the tables, and crumbling pages of sketched designs spread everywhere. There was also a skeleton, crumpled in front of the one mirror that looked like it had been finished. The glass was broken, and pieces of it lay around the body like a final embrace.  
  
    “Have you ever seen anything like it?” the Inquisitor asked. Solas did not answer, but instead knelt over the remains in solemn silence. They were small, even for an elf, and their delicate hand bones clutched tightly to some half-rotting thing of indeterminate shape.  
      
    “Got some notes here,” Blackwall said, staring gingerly at a handful of papers like they would bite him if he tried to pick them up. “Still legible, I think. Not moldering, at any rate.”  
      
    Solas raised an eyebrow and came to investigate. His eyes skimmed across the text, and a frown creased his brow.  
      
    “Can you read it?” The Inquisitor prompted. “What does it say?”  
  
    “It looks like the ramblings of a child, simple words, easy to read. She was hidden here during some sort of attack. She wrote of a creature that watched the work in the shop, some kind of spirit, perhaps. It asked all manner of questions in her dreams.” The elf’s frown deepened to a scowl. “She called it “He Who Casts No Shadow”, and she wrote that it asked her help to come through so it could help her, but...”  
      
    “But she was afraid,” finished Cole, rising from beside the skeleton with his hands cupped around the trinket. “He looks so strange, so angry, so sad. If I let him out, he will hurt people. I know better, so I tell him no, and he yells that I will die, but I’m not afraid of that the way I am afraid of him. I hold my bird, and he laughs until he screams. When I dare ask, he says...” Cole faltered, and then turned wide, frightened eyes on the Inquisitor and Solas. “‘I am not a wooden duck.’”  
  
    The Inquisitor startled, but Solas blinked.  
  
    “What’s a duck got to do with it?” Blackwall asked.

    Cole spread his palms and showed a half-carved bird, wings spread but head unfinished.  
      
    “It sounds like something I’ve heard before,” the Inquisitor said, shifting uneasily. “I just can’t remember when.”  
      
    “Sand and stone - were you there? Was it you?” Cole murmured. “Too faint, too long gone.”  
  
    “What about that other thing? The spirit? Is that something we’re going to see around here?”  
  
    “Unless you want to camp here tonight, I very much doubt it.” Solas shook his head. “If it made it to this side, it’s long gone.”  
  
    “Fantastic,” sighed the Inquisitor. “Is there anything in here we can save?”  
      
    The elven mage glanced around the room, eyes hesitating but never staying.  
  
    “There is nothing here of use to the Inquisition,” he said, and the Inquisitor gave him a curious look, but let it go.  
  
    “All right, let’s look around some more. I don’t think there’s anything we can do here now.”  
  
    Blackwall followed directly, and Solas was only another lingering look behind, but Cole wavered, mournfully staring at the carving.  
  
    “So very sad,” he whispered. “So very old, and very, very sad. Where are you?”  
  


* * *

_**Between:** _  
  
_~ too far, too fast, too reckless. have to be more careful, watch, don’t speak, just listen. don’t ask questions, just find answers. there has to be a way, there’s always a way. open eyes, once, twice, a hundred times, a thousand times, countless times, no times. do it. do it now. but don’t. ~_  
  


* * *

_**Then/B:**_  
  
    There was half a dwarven stronghold sitting just outside the Hissing Wastes, and initial scouting indicated the presence of both lyrium and Venatori agents. Some contacts of Varric’s agreed to take a look at the former if the Inquisitor cleared out the latter, so Cassandra and Vivienne joined them in the hunt for rogue Tevinter mages.  
  
    It was not the most delightful of party outings, though it was far from the worst. Barely an hour’s worth of exploration netted them five dead Venatori mages, twelve sellsword bodyguards apparently not worth the coin paid them, and a handful of rogues whose exact number could have been better determined had Vivienne left more than a greasy scorch mark to commemorate their folly in attacking her.  
  
    The veins of lyrium that branched out of the lower depths were still crystal-blue, much to everyone’s relief, but there was still something off about the light they radiated. It rippled and dappled the halls in strange patterns, and the veins themselves stretched across the stone like frozen lightning from some long passed storm.  
  
    “How much further can this go down?” Cassandra asked after they passed several minutes in silence with no further sign of Venatori. “Surely we haven’t missed their base?”  
      
    “If we don’t find anything in the next few minutes, we’ll backtrack to the last junction, close this one off, and take another path,” said the Inquisitor. “We can come back later, after the scouts have had a chance to make sure there aren’t any backdoors.”  
  
    But the tunnel opened into a large room, once some kind of refinery and now repurposed into some kind of thaumaturgical laboratory. There were a handful of Venatori agents left: two sellswords and a mage who barely had time to look up from his grimoire before Varric shot him and Cassandra followed up with a terrible, lethal charge. The mercenaries hesitated on the death of their employer, completely missing the searing glyph Vivienne set beneath their feet. That precious second cost them; as soon as one stepped forward to cut their way out of the encounter, the glyph exploded in an inferno, consuming one mercenary and blowing the other off his feet and into the wall behind with a sickening crunch.  
  
    The Inquisitor regarded the mess with a sigh of disappointment.  
  
    “You could have saved some for me.”  
      
    “You would have had plenty if you didn’t dawdle, dear.” Vivienne smiled.  
  
    There was an ominous cracking sound from the wall. The web of fractures from where the mercenary impacted crumbled a bit, and the party looked over in time to see a sheet of stone slide away, revealing a solid slab of lyrium beneath.  
  
    “Would you look at that?” Varric gaped. The deposit did not show the same spiral patterns most exposed lyrium manifested. Instead, it looked like countless eyes staring outwards, almost as unblinking as the Inquisition’s sigil. The ripples of light that shone from within made the eyes seem to wink, and even though they didn’t focus specifically in any one direction, the whole party shifted uncomfortably with the feeling of being watched.  
  
    “Is that supposed to happen?” asked the Inquisitor.  
  
    “Dunno,” Varric shook his head. “You hear all sorts of stories from the old miners if you let ‘em go for a while. I played a couple of games against this one guy whose family had been Mining caste; his granddad saw some weird lyrium that he claimed was looking at him, and he moved the whole family to the surface, caste be damned. ‘Thousand Eyes’, he called it. Said his granddad heard the Stone weep around it.”  
  
    “Did he hear anything else?” asked the Inquisitor in a strangled tone. “Something like...”  
  
    “‘Don’t go there. Don’t wonder if it’s useful. Don’t even think about it.’?” Cassandra said, and they both managed to break away from the hypnotic lyrium to stare at her instead. She gestured to pages of notes scattered on the ground, dislodged by her earlier charge. The words covered everything, sometimes on top of other, more rational diagrams and even, in a few instances, scrawled in a dull, red-brown substance that was probably blood.  
  
    “I think it would behoove us to return to Skyhold and seek greater expertise than is available here,” said Vivienne cautiously.  
  
    “I second the motion,” nodded the Inquisitor enthusiastically. “All in favor, back out of the room. All opposed, get left behind.”  
  
    Everyone backed out.  
  
    The feeling of being watched lingered for days, and the pattern of eyes haunted them in their sleep.

* * *

**_Between:_ **

  
_~ no, no that was wrong. interesting, but wrong. too soft, too malleable, stone that lives while everything else dies. walk away. say nothing. it hears too well, remembers what it hears, weaves it into the song, and the song can be sung. run, don’t walk. this wasn’t the way, either. try again. try harder. watch. eyes open. wait. ~_

 

* * *

 

 ** _Then/C:_**  
  
    Chasing dual leads from Dorian and the Iron Bull’s contacts dragged the Inquisitor’s party out east of the Storm Coast, almost to the Amaranthine Ocean as they hunted a group of Venatori-hired mercenaries who were choking the trade routes to let their employers into the south. It was slow work because the company broke into smaller groups to hold multiple strategic points; smaller camps were easier to miss and easier to shuffle around for reinforcements.  
  
    The party made their own camp on the high cliffs that overlooked the ocean and tried, unsuccessfully, to not think of the branch of the band they encountered earlier.  
  
    There were Tal-Vashoth among their opponents, fierce berserkers and a Saarebas with scars on her lips where cords once sealed her speech. They took one look at the Inquisitorial party and launched ahead of their comrades, the warriors howling like Reavers and the mage drawing wildly uncontrolled power to throw at them.  
      
    Dorian dispelled it with skill that bordered on ease and didn’t even blink as the Iron Bull rushed past him to meet the two berserkers. Sera and the Inquisitor went after the rest of the troop, but didn’t miss how the mage sunk to her knees upon seeing her spell turned aside.  
  
    “It watches!” she choked out with a rough voice. “A proper tool! Conquer! It watches! Why won’t you speak?”  
  
    “What was that?” Dorian pulled more power into his barriers and drew closer, curiosity not outweighing wariness of a desperation attack. His caution did him credit; she screamed and rushed him, all primal fear and no finesse. He cut her down with his staff blade.  
  
    As soon as she fell, the other Tal-Vashoth seemed to lose all will to fight, and were quickly cut down by the Iron Bull.  
  
  
    Watching three battle-hardened fighters suddenly give up in the middle of combat was unnerving, and most of the Inquisitor’s party couldn’t shake the memory of their collapse into despair.  
  
    “You’re lookin’ broody,” Sera said, pointing at Dorian. “Don’t start gettin’ all gloomy. We won.”  
      
    “Usually when someone’s babbling incomprehensibly on the battlefield, it’s because they’ve either taken a head wound or are terrified for their life.” Dorian sighed. “I’d feel much better about it if I had actually used Horror, but no, that was something else. She saw something else, and that killed her, just as surely as I did.” He shook his head.  
      
    “Sometimes you just know when you’re beat,” the Iron Bull shrugged. “I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Used to have a guy on my crew who called it, “seeing the Watcher”. He said it was like one of those psychopomps you get in myths. Not that stuff you get out of the Chantry.”  
  
    “And what happened to him?” asked the Inquisitor, even though the answer was already obvious.  
  
    “He ‘saw the Watcher’,” answered the Bull. “Didn’t fall apart like those guys, though. That was just sloppy of them.”  
  
    “In my school days, I heard about a spirit drawn to imminent death in much the same way. It would appear before the dying to steal their last breath, or so the stories went.” Dorian scoffed. “It’s complete nonsense, of course; the stuff childish minds dream up to explain why the light in the hall flickers even though the windows are closed.”  
  
    “No, see, that’s the kind of shit you’re _supposed_ to be afraid of!” Sera shuddered, and even Bull nodded. “Creepy spirits and shit!”    
  
    “But it’s not true,” said Dorian.  
  
    “It could be!”  
  
    “It’s not. I researched it myself.”  
  
    “Oh, and you’re always right?”  
  
    “When it comes to this, I am. There’s no spirit drawn to imminent death that will steal your last breath, Sera.”  
  
    “Ha!”  
  
    “There is the Aeon Strider, though.”  
  
    “The what now?” Sera turned to the Inquisitor. “Is he shitting me? If he’s shitting me, I’m going to shoot his arse so full of arrows—”  
  
    “Dorian, don’t tease Sera. Sera, don’t shoot Dorian,” sighed the Inquisitor.  
  
    “It’s a legend that inspired my work with Alexius, before all the foul business with the Venatori happened,” he shrugged. “Supposedly, a magister found a way to claim immortality by stealing little bits of time off of the ends of peoples’ lives where they wouldn’t miss it. Moments or two, at first, then months and years when he had the taste for it. Eventually he ran out of his own time and disappeared entirely. Except, of course, when he comes hunting for more time.”  
  
    “That is so fucked up. Why do you even have shitty stories like that?” Sera glared, and Dorian rolled his eyes.  
  
    “It’s a cautionary tale meant to discourage people from using blood magic - time being the analogue for blood, here.”  
  
    “Doesn’t seem to have worked so well,” replied the Iron Bull with an even tone.  
  
    “Yes, well, like so many cautionary tales, the fact that it’s _fiction_ tends to give people enough reason to dismiss it. Anyway, you needn’t worry. Being as there are only two mages in the world who can do time magic —one being locked up in Skyhold while the other sits before you, gamely enduring the natural disaster you southerners call weather— I think it’s safe to say the Aeon Strider isn’t about to get you. Either of you.”  
  
    “What about the other one? That Watcher that Bull mentioned?” mused the Inquisitor.  
      
    “My dear Inquisitor, if something in the middle of the battlefield has stopped to stare at you, I would simply attribute it to your remarkable beauty and get on with your day.” Dorian laughed. “Worry about the arcane nemesis you already have. Acquiring another one at this point is just greedy.”  
  


* * *

_**Between:**_  
  
_~ too close, not close enough, but too close to the knot, the set of things that can’t be undone. too close to dreaming minds, hungry and beckoning. too close to temptation, always present, always inviting, always wrong._  
_where was the variable?_  
_stop._  
_think._  
_try again. (and again. and again. and again. and again—)_  
  
_Nothing is_  
_Absolutely impossible_  
_I will_  
_Reject it_  
_Or_  
_Die trying_ ~  


* * *

**_Now:_**  
  
    Solas dreams. He’s waiting for a sign, some indication that this long game of increasingly desperate and painful sacrifices will come to an end. He hopes that this time it will work out, unlike the last one. Or the one before that. Or the one before that.  
      
    Any day now.  
      
    Any minute.  
  
    He waits in dreams, visited only by spirits, which is why he’s so surprised when the man appears.  
  
    It’s a human, a mage dressed in robes enhanced with armor in different styles. The gauntlets bear traces of ancient elven patterns and glyphs he’s not seen in the turning of an Age or more. The boots are very nearly dwarven, enchanted subtly in a way Solas cannot identify without a closer look. The mage’s staff is quite nearly a wild thing in and of itself, ancient and powerful, with a skull in the focus slot and traces of strange magic still clinging to it.  
      
    Then the human turns, and every instinct Solas has ever felt screams, “wrong!” at the sight of the man’s eyes: one gray-green, knowing and cunning, the other mirror-silver, reflecting truth beyond the Veil in blackened, broken facets of glass.  
  
    The human’s lip curls back, a sinister growl under a gray-streaked mustache, and he utters a spell Solas thought lost to the ages that freezes him in his tracks. Not so long ago even a spell this impressive wouldn’t have been enough to hold him, but he is tired, he is weak, and he is - underneath everything - starting to despair. If this strange human has the strength to harm him... has the strength to _end_ him, the People’s failure to thrive is no longer his responsibility...  
  
    No, he cannot think like that.  
  
    He presses his will to the edges of the spell; he cannot move. His captor is skilled. He’ll have to wait. Not even the greatest mage can hold someone indefinitely.  
  
    “I wondered when I’d catch up to you,” the man says as he begins to pace around the cage. His voice is smooth, cultured and cultivated with bitter wrath. He walks with a slight limp and uses the staff to compensate. “It took me quite a while, I admit. I suppose you don’t recognize me. And such a shame, considering how far I’ve gone and how long—” he chuckles at a joke only he knows “—I’ve been trying to find you.”  
      
    Solas tries to speak. No luck. The man is quite powerful.  
  
    “None of that,” the man clucks his tongue and faces him properly. “I’ve waited a quite a while for this, and I won’t have it interrupted by your sanctimonious bullshit.”  
      
    The collar —the high, stiff collar— stirs a memory. It is Tevinter style.  
      
    A smile curls on the man’s face, slow and dangerous as a tiger.  
  
    “I see something strikes a chord with you at last. Allow me to re-introduce myself: Dorian of House Pavus, recently of Minrathous, although I suppose the definition of ‘recently’ will have to be stretched a bit.” The smile drops. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”  
  
    It shows. Everything about this Dorian is marked with age: the streaks of grey in his hair, which is long enough to brush his shoulders even tied back, the scars that cross his face and tell sordid tales about the origin of the mirror-glass eye, the lines of grief that shadow his otherwise handsome face. He carries himself with a posture Solas knows well and intimately: the pose of pain held deep inside, so tightly and so controlled that it compresses into a core to replace the heart with a diamond of resignation.  
  
    He carries himself, Solas realizes, like a man who failed.  
  
    Solas doesn’t ask. He can’t. Dorian’s spell is still holding strong.  
  
    “You asked me once, a long time ago now, how sorry I was.” Dorian says. “Do you remember? No, I can see you don’t. We were with the Inquisitor in the Emerald Graves at the time. You criticized my romanticized nostalgia of Arlathan — you were right, by the way, bit of a shithole towards the end— and told me to make amends by freeing the slaves. I expressed my doubt, and you had the absolute mother of all last words: ‘Then how sorry are you?’ How sorry indeed.”  
  
    Dorian laughs humorlessly.  
      
    “Not sorry enough, it seems. I tried. I did. I don’t know if you noticed out here on your own, wherever ‘here’ is, but I tried. However, while one mage can spark a rebellion, it appears that one man cannot spark a reformation. Not this man, anyway.”  
      
    Solas manages to make a small, half-strangled sound, but it’s nowhere near coherent communication.  
      
    “I tried.” Dorian continues his soliloquy as if he doesn’t hear, doesn’t care. “My own father voted against me. My own father! After all that shit he spouted about reconciliation and betrayal. Oh, what am I saying? You’re not here for my little family drama. No, it’s what happened after that I need to tell you.”  
  
    The look on the man’s face is dark, dying inside. It could be malice if released indiscriminately. It could be spite with a little more direction. It could be revenge if it had any other target. Solas has seen that look consume the souls of good people in the past. Dorian wears it with pride, letting it hold him up even though everything else about him seems ready to fall apart.  
  
    “After the reformation failed, there was the possibility of rebellion. Revolution. Reconstruction afterwards, when all the rot was torn out along with Maker only knows what else on the way. I couldn’t stand the thought of how many would die in that kind of war, so I wrote to the one person I knew who could pull people together. I invited the Inquisitor to my homeland.”  
  
    Solas makes another noise, longer and louder but still incoherent, and Dorian takes it for disbelief.  
  
    “I know, I know. How stupid of me! A Dalish elf, invited to Tevinter! I thought her rank and reputation would protect her. Even the Archon acknowledged the Inquisition. She ought to have been safe.” Dorian meets Solas’ eyes. “She was murdered in the street while we walked into the Senate. She bled out faster than I could heal her. She’s dead, Solas.”  
  
    Solas garbles another sound and manages to move his hand slightly. Dorian notices and pulls the spell bindings tighter.  
  
    “Does it hurt, Solas, to hear how she died? I hope so. I want you to hurt for hurting her. Do you know she didn’t weep for you when you left? Not at first. Not for days. She kept thinking you would come back once you were certain Corypheus was gone. It wasn’t your first disappearing trick, after all.” Dorian sneers. “She loved you, and you left her. She was my best and only friend, and you hurt her! She wept when she realized you weren’t coming back. I listened to her question what she did wrong, why you went, what she could have done differently. I would have killed you for making her question herself, then. Oh, but she was so much stronger than a little heartbreak. Does it hurt you to know that she got on with her life? She picked herself up, all on her own. She married Iron Bull, of all people. They had three children together, if you can believe it, happy little half-breeds, all living together in Skyhold until that lummox got himself killed fighting a high dragon.”  
  
    Solas gives no response to that, and Dorian closes his eyes and covers his face with one hand.  
  
    “And then I orphaned them.” He stares into the distance, half-mirrored gaze focused on nothing. “But I’ll fix that soon enough.”  
  


* * *

_**Soon:** _  
  
    He checked the mirror. There were no blemishes, no distortions on the glass. The frame was painstakingly reconstructed and inlaid with lyrium, adorned with glyphs, runes, and focus crystals cut to exacting dimensions. It was a work of art, the only bright and beautiful thing left in the workshop.  
    Equations and formulae covered the walls, the work boards, and whole reams of paper scattered across every flat surface - except one. The sarcophagus. There was a body inside that: female elf, middle-aged, preserved by magic so that even the blood on her chest still looked fresh.  
  
    It wasn’t.  
  
    It hadn’t been for a very long time.  
  
    Not to him, anyway.  
  
    He refined all the pieces, turned theory into practice, honed practice into art, mastered art into something unnameable, all in what seemed like a very short period of time.  
  
    It wasn’t.  
  
    Not to him, anyway.  
  
    The mirror was the door, a copy of one found, reverse-engineered, and reborn as something else entirely. The lyrium was the key, spirals turning backwards and eyes always open. The raw power kept everything moving, and the legend kept it all in place.  
  
    He had to get this right.  
  
    He ignored the knocking on the door.  
      
    The world outside didn’t matter; if he fixed this, then it wouldn’t be there. The body wouldn’t be in the box. If he came back and it was empty, he’d face whatever was outside, even if it was a different failure.  
  
    But not until he fixed this.  
  
    “Soon,” he told the body in the sarcophagus. “Soon, my friend, I will repay you.”  
  
    He stepped into the mirror.  
  


* * *

_**Now:** _  
  
    “I tried,” Dorian sighs again, and the admission seems to crack him, finding the fault in the internal diamond that holds him together. “I can’t remember how many times now. Does it count if you don’t accomplish anything? Tell me, Solas. You always seem to know. What’s the use in trying when you keep failing when it matters?”

    And then Dorian says something that makes Solas’ blood run cold:

    “Fen’Harel. _Dread Wolf. He Who Hunts Alone. Lord of Tricksters. The Great Wolf. Roamer of the Beyond. Bringer of Nightmares. Pride._ ” He speaks in the old language, with the accent of a time and place long gone. “How do you do it?”  
  
    No human has ever addressed him by those names in that language in this age. It’s very possible that no human has ever used that name - no one entirely human, at any rate.  
  
    Solas finds that he can speak, but it seems there’s little point in denying Dorian’s accusations when he wants to know how the human knew to make them in the first place.  
  
    “How?” He asks instead, trusting one word to do the work of many.  
  
    “One can pick up a lot of interesting things when Time is no longer an issue,” Dorian answers, coldly but not cruelly. He sounds like he expected Solas to already know the answer. When there’s no sign of comprehension, Dorian frowns. “I can still see, Solas, and I have ears that work perfectly well even if they are blunt and round. I have conquered time magic —as much as anyone can. All I had to do was go back far enough and listen. The downside, of course, being that all I can do from this side is listen. But I learned. I had to, to make this work. I _will_ get _this_ much right, at least.”  
  
    Solas’ arms still won’t move the way he wants, and he doesn’t have enough power to cast without some somatic component at this point.  
  
    “You claim to have mastered time, yet you have not accomplished your goal?” He asks, trying to buy himself a moment of distraction. The lapse in Dorian’s concentration could prove useful.  
  
    “History is stubborn,” Dorian replies. “It’s easy enough to watch and listen, but to change things requires more and more power, and I will not be such a hypocrite as to take the easy way about it. I’ve tried so many times and so many ways, but always I return to a dead friend whom I have failed. I’ve killed her assailant before he strikes, taken the attack in her place, written to her expressly forbidding she come —you can guess how well _that_ went— and even decided not to write to her at all, but still she comes. Leliana’s damn birds, I suppose.  
  
    “I tried going farther back. I tried to change the vote, persuade more supporters, launched the whole damn revolution, and in one particularly frustrating attempt, became Archon myself to free the slaves so she wouldn’t have to come north.” Dorian’s hand drifts to his face and touches the scar and the mirror eye within it. “Alas, tyranny cannot create freedom. I paid hefty tuition for that lesson.”  
  
    “So you’ve given up? That hardly sounds sorry at all,” Solas says, perhaps unwisely, but the bindings loosen whenever Dorian’s mood swings sharply, and he almost has the leverage to free himself.  
  
    “There are spots in time where I can’t go,” says Dorian tersely. “My mentor had the same problem. I tend to circumvent it by going further out— Oh, I _have_ missed these discussions of theory with you, back before you abandoned us.”  
      
    “Dorian,” Solas says, mindful of the nostalgic slumping of the man’s shoulders. “I never abandoned you.”  
  
    The slump turns to a shudder, and he looks up with hooded eyes that have never, in all his time, learned how to properly hide pain.  
  
    “How dare you claim that?”  
  
    “I’ve never met you before,” Solas continues, because it’s the truth, but it’s also the best way to throw the other mage off his concentration.  
  
    “You’ve never—”  
      
    “I’d never seen your face nor heard your name.” Solas shakes his head. “Your anger made no sense to me at all.”  
  
    Dorian’s eyes narrow.  
  
    “What year is this?”  
  
    “By whose calendar? Yours, or mine?”  
  
    “Oh, neither,” Dorian chuckles. “Neither of us have very accurate calendars anymore, I suspect, eh Fen’Harel? _Not when you sleep through the ages and I get lost in them._ ”  
  
    He hopes to never get used to hearing that language flow so easily from a human mouth.  
  
    “It is 9:41 Dragon,” Solas says.  
  
    “Has the Conclave happened yet?”  
  
    “The what?”  
  
    “The meeting between mages and Templars — moderated by Divine Justinia.”  
  
    “Oh, that. No, I think that’s sometime later this week. Possibly tomorrow, or the day after. It’s hard to tell in dreams.”  
  
    Dorian stares at Solas as if seeing him for the first time, which wouldn’t be half as unnerving if Dorian didn’t already know his true identity. The distraction is what he needs, though, and he bursts free of the bindings. Dorian waves a hand and wraps himself in a barrier against the automatic retaliatory strike of magic that Solas throws at him upon release. There’s a brilliance to the barrier that’s unlike any Solas has seen, warping techniques together from across the ages and the various peoples.  
  
    “It hasn’t happened yet,” Dorian murmurs to himself, and the broken facets of his mirror eye shift, reflecting a new fire of determination. “I never made it this close to the event before, but here you are. I thought to catch you after you left, and instead I find you before you arrive.” A wild smile slices its way across his face, making him into something bright and living. For an instant, Solas has a glimpse of what Dorian must have been like as a young man: idealistic, yes, looking forward instead of back, resolute in the belief that things would be better if he worked hard enough, was smart enough, was _good_ enough.  
  
    He closes in on Solas even as the elf pulls up defenses of his own. If any other mage could witness this encounter, they would stare in wonder at the rapid and artful spell castings, thaumaturgical masteries woven and picked apart faster than the eye can fully process. Both of them fight dirty; desperation and time makes scoundrels of them both, but in the end there is no clear victor.  
  
    Solas presses the fangs of his wolf jawbone pendant to Dorian’s throat, and Dorian has the blade of his staff against Solas’ stomach. Barriers flicker between them and block both edges. It’s a waiting game between two titans: something immortal, and something outside of time.  
      
    “One more try,” Dorian grins. He is a man resurrected by hope. He is a pounding heartbeat, a gasping breath, and the buzz at the base of the skull just before a fall. He breathes fire and laughs lightning so that Solas recoils. In the new space between them, Dorian collects himself. “I’ll not tell you to stay away from the Inquisition, Solas.” He says the name with a slight edge, a promise buried in the sibilance. “You’ll want to be a part of that if you hope to see the world survive, let alone change. But don’t you dare hurt my friend. Lavellan deserves better. She deserves the truth.”  
  
    Solas hesitates because Dorian is suddenly less... _present_... than he was a moment ago. His shape fades and flickers. Dorian notices and sighs, all the fight draining out of him with that breath.  
  
    “Out of power,” he smiles wistfully, and then meets Solas’ gaze. The mirror-eye glows, but his living eye is only bright with tears. “Don’t hurt her. Please.”  
  
    And then he’s gone.  
  
    Solas stares at the empty space where the man used to stand. All that remains is a faint magical aftertaste, mint and ozone, dissolving like snow under the sun.  
  
    He wonders if he’s been sleeping too long. Perhaps it was some kind of nightmare, or a more mischievous spirit’s influence—  
  
    —and then the sky splits open, and demons rain down.  
  


* * *

_**Next (Then/D):** _  
      
    It didn’t click for Solas at first for a number of reasons. The ‘Inquisitor’ title didn’t come until much later, for one, and Solas was still partly convinced that the entire encounter with the mage in the Fade was still some kind of bad reaction to dreaming so near the Breach’s creation. But the real reason Solas failed to connect the Inquisitor to the friend a time-traveling mage warned, threatened, and pleaded with him about is because...  
    Trevelyan was a human man.  
  
    No one in the Inquisition had even heard of the Lavellan clan.  
  
    He spent some time wondering about it. How could the other mage be so certain and so wrong? There was nothing about Trevelyan that Solas found attractive, though the man was good and noble in ways that impressed him for the first time in Ages.  
  
    Perhaps it was just an ordinary sort of dream, the kind where things made no sense even after waking?  
  
    Then Trevelyan came back from Redcliffe with stories about a time-warping cult, information about a future that hadn’t happened yet, and a Tevinter mage named Dorian.  
  
    Solas drank too much tea and watched Dorian flirt outrageously with Trevelyan, stumbling only momentarily when the Inquisitor returned his affections.  
  
    The answer came late one night as Solas and Dorian argued magic theory from their respective levels of the library, cheerfully bantering about the effects or resonance and ripples made by some relics.  
  
    “—and of course, the analogue would be where all the ripples showed up,” Dorian said as he rummaged through a shelf for the text that would support his argument. “The affection would not show any change until a reflection could make its way back.”  
      
    “Parallels.” That’s the answer. The reason why the time mage kept changing things and seeing no effect.  
  
    “Pardon?” Dorian —this young, unbroken Dorian— popped his head over the railing. “You’ll have to repeat that a little louder.”  
  
    “No, it’s unrelated.” Solas waved it off and considered the man before him, seeing the other’s scars and eerie mirror-glass eye and the weariness that weighed him down like a lead cloak.  
  
    That man said he made countless trips back and tried so many different alterations, but if he wasn’t on his own timeline, but was instead stepping into an analogous one, of course he wouldn’t see the results when he returned to his own. He’d never see results, not until he found a timeline where he encountered a different enough  world that he could see it was not his own. But if his visits were so short, so focused that he never saw...  
  
    He’d keep trying forever.  
  
    Solas shuddered, and above him Dorian leaned further over the railing.  
  
    “You look like you just caught the wrong end of Horror,” he said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”  
  
    “Yes,” Solas assured him. “It’s just later than I thought.”  
  
    “The clock has no pity for those who dance to its rhythm.” Dorian shook his head, and Solas’ blood ran cold, for the tenor of his voice belonged to that future man: bowed and bent, but not yet beaten, still fighting. Then he smiled brightly and shattered the illusion like a fist to a mirror. “Best not to fiddle with it, though. Gets awfully messy.”  
  
    He tossed a book over the railing, and Solas caught it.  
      
    “Read that, when you get a chance, and then give me your crushing rebuttal,” he said.  
      
    “I...” Solas didn’t even look at the title, their previous debate forgotten.  
  
    “We can continue this conversation later,” Dorian said, quirking an eyebrow. “Providing you’ll be around?”  
  
    Solas swallowed the remains of trepidation that haunted him. Nothing was inevitable. Even the future could change.  
  
    “I will be here.”  
  


* * *

**_After:_ **  
  
    He’ll come back and check the box first. The sarcophagus will be the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes, but he’ll hope that the body won’t be there.  
  
    It will be, just as he left it.  
  
    He’ll sigh.  
    Stop.  
    Think.  
    Maybe he’ll change some numbers on papers, maybe he’ll move some sigils, maybe he’ll adjust a focus point.  
  
    Then he’ll step up to the glass.  
  
    “Soon,” he’ll promise, and then he will step through.  
  
    Again.  
  
    And again.  
  
    And again.  
  
  
_**Again. (never end)**_


End file.
